Because I believe we need each other. I know I do. Most days I can’t find my car keys, my cell phone or my mind. Most nights I think my heart will burst wide open from all the messy love stuffed inside it for those sweetly snoring kids.

And many mornings I want to quit motherhood before I’ve even served the first bowl of Cheerios of the day. But writing this book reminded me that our kids and our stories are not by accident. Both are a gift from the God who gave them to us.

My most recent book is about friendship. About how nothing hurts as much as the unkind words of a friend. And nothing heals as much as the acceptance and encouragement of a friend.

I’ve heard too many stories, cried with too many women, and apologized too many times to think I’m the only one with these bruises on my heart and holes in my story where friends fell through.

I’m guessing you can relate?

I’m guessing that, like me, while on the outside you might look like a grownup —maybe even with kids of her own—there’s a teenage girl that lives inside you just like the one that lives inside me.

No one can make us quite as unsure about ourselves as another woman.

And no one can make us quite as brave as another woman.

Because that’s what we all long for. The safety of friends who won’t unfriend us. We want to know what the secret is.

As honestly as I could I wrote them down for you. All the secrets I’ve learned the hard way.

So on this blog and in my books I do my best not to dress up life or faith or motherhood or friendship. I try to tell it straight. Because trying to survive these rollercoasters while under the impression that other women somehow have it all together is dreadfully discouraging.

Instead, I believe that the shortest distance between strangers and friends is a shared awkward story.

And that I think it’s supposed to be like that. Because I believe in a God who is never done teaching us how to become less of us and more of Him.

I love that the Internet gives us a way to share our every day, extraordinary stories.

I’ve shared stories from my homeland of South Africa and love my current full time job as the Community Manager for the beautiful site, (in)courage – a place for girlfriends to put their feet up on the coffee table and share all the hard, wonderful, ordinary stories that make up life. A place to find yourself among friends.

I’m South African, currently living in the States after a couple years in Ukraine with travel to Belarus, the Czech Republic, Poland, Egypt, Botswana and a few wonderful years in Michigan. I love how social media can change the world for good, one blog post at a time. How it gives us glimpses into the similar stories we live right there between the cereal boxes and kids’ undone art projects at our messy kitchen tables.

And so I keep coming back here with words about motherhood and faith, about friendship and family. This is my truth. And I promise to keep on telling it, this love story. Of how Jesus would have loved me the same whether I had children or not. But how He is remaking me day in and day out through this gift that He saved till last.

So come back tomorrow. And the day after. And I will still be here, unwrapping, unwrapping, unwrapping all this crawling, toddling, laughing, crying extraordinarily sacred ordinary.